Script Recognition with Hierarchical Feature Maps

Abstract

The hierarchical feature map system recognizes an input story as an instance of a particular script by classifying it at three levels: scripts, tracks and role bindings. The recognition taxonomy, i.e. the breakdown of each script into the tracks and roles, is extracted automatically and independently for each script from examples of script instantiations in an unsupervised self-organizing process. The process resembles human learning in that the differentiation of the most frequently encountered scripts become gradually the most detailed. The resulting structure is a hierarchical pyramid of feature maps. The hierarchy visualizes the taxonomy and the maps lay out the topology of each level. The number of input lines and the self-organization time are considerably reduced compared to the ordinary single-level feature mapping. The system can recognize incomplete stories and recover the missing events. The taxonomy also serves as memory organization for script-based episodic memory. The maps assign a unique memory location for each script instantiation. The most salient parts of the input data are separated and most resources are concentrated on representing them accurately.

This research was supported in part by an ITA Foundation grant and by fellowships from the Academy of Finland, the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, the Foundation for the Advancement of Technology, and the Alfred Kordelin Foundation (Finland). Special thanks go to Michael Dyer for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.